Ubisoft is pulling the blinds down on Red Storm Entertainment, the US-based studio that it acquired back in 2000. The news is surprising, given that the studio is one of the earliest and oldest acquisition by the French studio and developer.
Additionally, Ubisoft will be laying off 105 jobs from Red Storm as part of its continued cost-cutting efforts across the board. To be clear, the studio will remain open and some folks will still retain their jobs. However, those said folks will instead be shifted towards maintaining Massive Entertainment’s Snowdrop Engine, one of the primary game engines owned by Ubisoft, and used to run the Division. Oh, and the remaining staff will also be working in IT and customer relationship roles.
Founded in 1996, Red Storm Entertainment came into the limelight with the release of the very first Rainbow Six game in 1998. The studio was also responsible for the creation of the Ghost Recon IP, although that came a year after Ubisoft acquired the studio.
Red Storm and its woes notwithstanding, Ubisoft has been riding rough for the past few years. The publisher cum developer has been struggling to stay afloat, and has even been cancelling titles that were well into their development cycles and it found a solution of sorts by accepting an investment from Chinese multinational technology company, Tencent. That investment, by the by, totals €1.16 billion (~RM5.26 billion), and was used to co-found Vantage Studio. That studio will oversee the French studio’s largest franchises: Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six.
And that’s just one of the five “Creative Houses” that Ubisoft plans on setting up. There are no official names for the remaining houses yet, only numbers. Creative House 2, in particular, will be handling The Division, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell.
(Source: Games Industry.biz)
